I added back half the borax from Dave's original recipe and a little bit of cryolite. I also doubled the potassium nitrate after looking at my other recipes. Small charges every 1.25 hours with a good stir in between each charge. It's looking really nice so far. We shall see.

Wow, it's gorgeous. Does exactly what I wanted. Pops right out of the furnace and has that beautiful fiery glow. It is also possible I screwed up my first melt of the 5% somehow, which has always been a thought in my head.

Added half of Dave's borax after reading boron was helpful, added .75% cryolite for same, doubled pot nitrate, pulverized the lithium with the STPP, small charges with stirring to maintain furnace temp as high as possible throughout the melt. There was only a very small patch of scum on the surface, similar in size to a patch of frogs eggs one sometimes gets. Raked off nice and easy. Gorgeous glass underneath. I suspect the patch would not have formed if I had stuck around for an extra hour after I put the last charge in to stir. Just need to adjust expansion now.

Those patches take forever to go away by themselves. If it's bubbles, I don't rake, I squirt them with a windex type bottle on straight spray.
Given Durk's suggestion regarding the formation of borates as an unpleasant side effect of the borax plus moisture, it makes me wonder if it might be better to use boric acid or anhydrous borax. The boric acid would bring expansion down, something borax really doesn't do. I tend to put the nitrates in a coffee grinder since all of that stuff is prilled now and the things are too big.

I was charging a cobalt silver opal and a copper ruby yesterday and had time to consider Volf on the subject of strontium and it doesn't really quite say it can substitute in part or whole on the calcium but it is clear to me that the less calcium the better if you don't like Apatite chunks. It was wise of you to crush the STP in the lithium. It's a favorite trick.

I haven't tried a copper ruby since I left New Mexico. Doing that with a moly is a futile exercise but with this little gas furnace I'm running now, my old 7,000 feet in the foothills formula was rather intense and a thread the size of a human hair struck very well on the outside of a clear gather, to the point that I cut the copper content in half and still have a red strike going on a punty whereas the goal was to have it strike in the annealer. Making it as a phosphate might be remarkable, sort of like those old Mother of Pearl colors Zimmermann used to make.

Pete I would be really interested in hearing more about the copper ruby phosphate. for some reason i was under the impression that because the ruby needs to be reduced so much that it wouldn't work in a phosphate base that has the oxygen. Could you walk me through that?

well, as I said, making it might be remarkable, so when I get it, I'll remark in better detail. .

In general, your glass is chock full of oxygen no matter what you do. All those carbonates. If you break your glass down in , moles, you can really see it. So you need something there to "reduce" ( make smaller) the 02 everywhere. Black tin works well. So would metallic copper but would be a PIA,

The formula for Tri sodium Phosphate is Na3PO4. Sodium tri phosphate is Na5P3O10 but each one would have oxygen glommed on to it. The old guano was really about 55% calcium and around 42% Phosphorous and oxygen. The theoretical formula for it is Ca5(OH)(PO4)3, but it varies. Real bone ash is hard to find and you really will have a lot of trouble with the calcium in it making apatite crystals which are really gross.

When I took chucks class he worked on cad sel colors in a phosphate base. If i remember right he was using mono calcium phosphate to reduce the O2. They turned out really nice i thought. I hadn't thought about the copper ruby until you said it. Looking forward to future remarks

When I took chucks class he worked on cad sel colors in a phosphate base. If i remember right he was using mono calcium phosphate to reduce the O2. They turned out really nice i thought. I hadn't thought about the copper ruby until you said it. Looking forward to future remarks

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